BETH LEVINE PORTFOLIO
ARCHITECTURE
The studio developed a coherent masterplan for the whole site, comprising a series of proposals that reflect each student’s chosen agenda and response to the place. The first
Pickeridge Farm
Role Project Architect
Location Ardingly, Sussex
Value £2,000,000
Stages RIBA 3-6
With Dow Jones Architects
Pickeridge Farm consists of 120 acres of pasture and woodland, a Grade-II listed 16th-century farmhouse, and a series of Victorian, Edwardian and contemporary outbuildings, located near the village of Ardingly in the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The purpose of our project was to refurbish, extend and re-purpose this collection of buildings to provide a single-family home and multi-purpose rental complex within a restored landscape. Our approach involves making careful alterations to the built fabric, either to adapt unsuccessful previous remodelling or to make changes that improve the spatial experience.
We re-planned the spatial sequence of the site to accommodate new uses. Phase 1 adapts the outbuildings to create a rental complex. It provides a workshop and yoga studio, two holiday rental accommodation units, an office, and a flexible events space, including WCs, storage, a kitchen and a games room. Phase 2 refurbishes the Farmhouse throughout and extends it with a carefully considered oak and brick building.
The scheme reduces the site’s operational carbon impact through a wide range of measures, including the introduction of air source heat pumps, underfloor heating, photovoltaic panels, battery storage, insulation, double glazing and repairs to the building fabric.
The project employs a carefully considered palette of local materials, including West Hoathly Sussex blend bricks, Wealden Sussex Sandstone, plus oak and larch boarding sourced from the client’s own woodland. By selecting materials that reference both the existing agricultural buildings on site and the wider context of Sussex, we not only create a clear connection with place, but reduce the project’s embodied carbon footprint due to minimal associated transport emissions.
The refurbished 16th Century farmhouse with new brick extension
The refurbished 16th Century Farmhouse with new brick extension
The interior of the new Farmhouse extension
The refurbished historic Farmhouse interior, incorporating bespoke new joinery
The interior of the former swimming pool, refurbished to create holiday accommodation
The entrance to the new Farmhouse extension, with custom glazing manifestation
The refurbished Workshop, with new cladding and staircase, and the Farmhouse beyond
Brindisa Headquarters
Role Project Architect
Location Balham, London
Value £1,000,000
Stages RIBA 4-6
With Dow Jones Architects
This project refurbishes and extends an 19th Century coach house to provide sustainable new headquarters for award-winning Spanish foods company, Brindisa. We are creating high-quality office accommodation for Brindisa’s staff, and a new reception area to the coach house and adjacent warehouse.
Our project builds a new, highly energy efficient timber structure within the existing brick envelope, and introduces air source heat pumps to the site, a renewable energy source. A new slate clad roof extension provides an additional floor of office space, and a brick reception pavilion creates a welcoming new entrance to the complex. We referred to Brindisa’s brand identity palette when selecting finishes in order that the spaces reflect the spirit of the company.
The interior of the new roof extension
The redeveloped coach house and new staff terrace area
The interior of the new roof extension
The redeveloped coach house and Brindisa warehouse beyond
Silverdale Passivhaus
Role Architectural Assistant
Location Falmouth, Cornwall
Value £500,000
Stages RIBA 4-6
With Dow Jones Architects
This project replaces an unremarkable bungalow on a prominent waterside site in Falmouth with a sustainable new family home. The project was delivered to Passivhaus standards of accommodation, which involved designing a building that is highly insulated, has no thermal bridges in the envelope, is airtight, uses heat recovery ventilation, has highly insulating windows, and has innovative building services.
The house is a simple pitched roof form of two storeys with extended eaves, which act as brise-soleil and prevent overheating in the summer. It employs a timberbased method of construction and therefore has a very low embodied carbon footprint. Through good design, the house requires almost no heat input and is ten times less draughty than the standard set by the building regulations.
The Passivhaus under construction
St. Anselm’s Church, Kennington
Role Project Architect
Location Kennington, London
Value £3,000,000
Stages RIBA 3-4
With Dow Jones Architects
St. Anselm’s Kennington was conceived as a centralised church with a dome, but not realised due to the interruption of the first world war. This project will recognise the centrality of the original design and reorder the worship space to create a more intimate feeling and sense of connection within the building. The proposals include providing step-free access to the church with an enlarged new welcome space, creating a faience-clad coffee kiosk extension, and a reordering of the church in line with its original plan as a Latin Cross basilica with a towering new reredos.
Beyond the reredos, the current dead space is utilised to create a four-storey tower. The ground floor operates during services as the retrochoir, and can be used outside these times as a multi-purpose space opening onto a new garden. The first and second floors provide parish offices and meeting spaces, and the top floor is an impressive activity room open to the rafters, which will accommodate a variety of uses from Sunday School to Boys Brigade to ballet. Building plan showing new (red) and retained (greyscale) elements
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Concept design for the new reredos wall, which repurposes paintings by Norman Adams (Adobe Photoshop)
A visualisation of the new coffee kiosk extension to the church (Adobe Photoshop) 1.
The Architecture of Multispecies
Cohabitation
Type Ongoing research project With Feral Partnerships:
Enrico Brondelli di Brondello
James Powell
Matthew Darmour Paul
Carp as kitchen helpers. Shadehouses designed to host guests amidst ferns. Farmhouses where cattle lives downstairs. Decorative dovecotes for the harvest of nutrient-rich fertilisers. Enormous cylindrical towers for human remains to be devoured by vultures…
The Architecture of Multispecies Cohabitation is an ongoing research project by Feral Partnerships, which tells surprising and hopeful stories of human and other-than-human interdependence, facilitated by the architectures that host them. In the context of anthropogenic global warming and the accelerating extinction of species, this project draws from historical precedents in order to inspire new possibilities for building worlds with the other-than-human in mind.
Solo exhibition at the University of Sydney’s Tin Sheds Gallery, 2021
Solo exhibition at the San Mei Gallery, 2022
FÅGELHUS SWIF T BOX
inspired instructional pamphlet for swift box making (Rhino 3D & Vectorworks)
Commons for ZEN
Type MA project, RCA
Location Palermo, Sicily
Tutors Ippolito Pestilini Laparelli
Anna Puigjaner
Marina Otero Verzier
This project looks at a new form of domestic institution which hopes to expose and reduce the burden of unpaid domestic work and and improve social mobility for women of the ZEN housing estate, 45 minutes from the historic centre of Palermo.
ZEN is a socially deprived housing estate, built in 1969 to rehouse victims of an earthquake. The problems facing women nationally are amplified here. Only 20% of the 2500 households are legally occupied, which means 80% potentially have no easy access to healthcare. This, and the fact that 90% doctors in Sicily are opposed to abortion and are allowed to refuse women the procedure based on their moral beliefs, contributes to the average age of women having their first child in ZEN being 14 -16. This is a barrier to education and employment - only 92% of women are unemployed.
This project aims to break this cycle by providing a platform for the collectivisation and professionalisation of housework, promoting economic independence and fostering social mobility.
The architectural strategy employed will harness a tradition in ZEN of demolition by hand. When residents moved into ZEN and families started growing very large, very quickly, they would expand their household by demolishing walls and combining multiple dwellings. Demolition methods specified will likely be familiar to residents and thus local labour can be employed.
The program of the domestic institution is informed by the City of Vienna’s planning policy, which practices gender mainstreaming in all of its urban planning. I am proposing to the municipality of Palermo that the typology of ZEN is illegal in accordance with the City of Vienna’s Manual for Gender Mainstreaming in Urban Planning. There are two main areas it falls short: open space for children, and communal spaces for the housing blocks.
The project aims to provide high quality play spaces within sight and earshot of dwellings to reduce the burden of childcare. 2 pocket parks are integrated per block; they are positioned in order to reduce the overwhelming density of the development, and to maximise the number of households they are within eyeshot and earshot within. They take cues from Aldo Van Eyck’s playground and are driven by the idea that children are part of city, as are all the forms of their play - play opportunities are woven into the fabric of the city.
The size of the void to be removed is one half of an apartment over 3 stories. The remainder of these apartments are turned into communal facilities for the block, which promote the collectivisation & professionalisation of housework. This is informed by Silvia Federici’s writings on Wages for Housework, and argues that domestic work should be remunerated as it contributes to the production of the labour force and produces capital, thus enabling every other form of production to take place. Central is the production of “commoning” practices, starting with new collective forms of reproduction.
The adjacency of these two programs is key, as children are now able to play semi-supervised and mothers can feel less inhibited by the burden of childcare.
What is constructed is minimal in comparison to the amount of material removed, but instrumental in providing the infrastructure to facilitate any number of domestic activities and their subsequent commercialisation.
The primary element introduced to the envelope is a blockwork service wall between the communal facility and the playground. At the time of completion, ZEN was not connected to the municipal sewage system, electricity distribution network, or water system. Today ZEN remains very poorly serviced, and utilities are under Mafia control. Through the collection of rainwater and electricity generated by PV cells, the communal spaces hope to be as self sufficient as possible.
As women of ZEN to take ownership of the units, the opportunity arises for the collectivisation of housework. As the economy grows, the duplication of tasks in every household is reduced, and women gain time for themselves. Then the opportunity for social mobility arises. The idea of these spaces is not to confine women to typically female household tasks: making visible unwaged domestic work is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it.
Utilities in ZEN are under Mafia control. Through the collection of rainwater the communal spaces hope to be as self sufficient as possible.
The view from a communal space into a playground (Maxwell & Adobe Photoshop)
A Gendered Reading of the Guaranty Building
Type History & Theory Studies, RCA
Location Buffalo, New York
Louis Sullivan argued that buildings should express visually the essential innate quality of their type; thus he coined the term form ever follows function. But what does a gendered reading of Sullivan’s architectural discourse reveal about the functions chose to express through form? As a tall office building, the Guaranty Building expresses loftiness. But it could be argued that Sullivan used the skyscraper, a symbol of American civilization, to communicate something more.
The plates of Sullivan’s portfolio “A System of Architectural Ornament” demonstrate how an underlying geometric system of curved and straight lines is the driver of his ornament. These iterations begin linear in nature and build in complexity. Then, Sullivan introduces organic motifs which issue from the latent geometry, in the same manner that shoots and leaves emerge from and eventually enshroud their axis, the branch. In this process, the masculine-rational is represented in the inorganic geometric order, and the feminine-emotional is felt in the efflorescence which dominates the compositions.
In uniting ornamentation, the organic, feminineemotional, and the geometry of the rectangular mass, the intellectual, masculine-rational, Sullivan symbolises the heroism of emulating nature. In his “Inspiration: An Essay”, Sullivan proposes that this relationship between geometry and ornament is the grounding for nature’s mode of composition, having studied the biology of plant morphology and growth. Sullivan proclaims the feminine-emotional superior to its masculine counterpart by virtue of the hierarchy nature’s processes establish.
Modelled at 1:10 is the corner of the Guaranty Building’s exterior facade, stripped of its “garment of poetic imagery” to expose the “strong, athletic” forms beneath. What emerges when the building is unclothed is an image of constructive force. Structural action is emphasised when the feminine-emotional is stripped away and what remains can be considered anthropomorphic, emblematic of the male body, which Sullivan regarded as a symbol of power, a heroic constructive force.
Branding for various University of Cambridge events (Adobe Photoshop)
Pembroke Players play branding (Hand Drawing & Adobe Photoshop)
Pembroke Street magazine front cover (Watercolour & Adobe Photoshop)
Feral Partnerships branding (Adobe Illustrator)
ChinaTalk podcast branding concepts (Adobe Illustrator)
10Ticks educational resources branding concepts (Adobe Illustrator)
Various illustrations (Hand Drawing & Adobe Photoshop)
Unicef Sustainable Development Goals illustration (Hand Drawing & Adobe Illustrator)
Architectural Visualisation Work
The following pages include a range of architectural visualisation work, produced as a student, in practice, and with my design collective Feral Partnerships. I can work with confidence across Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, Vectorworks, Rhino 3D, SketchUp and Maxwell Render. I am also proficient in hand drawing and physical model-making.
The programmatic considerations for a pool operated by a social enterprise Basin’s End Swimming Pool, undergraduate project (Hand Drawing & Adobe Illustrator)
Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, with Epstein Joslin Architects (SketchUp, Maxwell Render & Adobe Photoshop)
Groton Hill Music Center, with Epstein Joslin Architects (SketchUp, Maxwell Render & Adobe Photoshop)
Proof of concept image for window artwork at San Mei Gallery, with Feral Partnerships (Adobe Photoshop)
Park Hill Art Space concept elevation, with Dow Jones Architects (Vectorworks & Adobe Photoshop)
Park Hill Art Space, Sheffield
Park Hill Art Space, Sheffield